5 Lessons from 5 Years

I. Dear Reader

It’s officially been 5 years of writing the Indie RPG Newsletter. I started in August 2020 (which maybe makes this a pandemic project) with no real goal except to write about games. And I don’t think I’ve ever so clearly achieved — and exceeded — a goal like this. On one level, there’s more than seven thousand people here now and we started with zero. But the internet really did a number on numbers. Previously, you could use them to ground yourself, now they do the opposite — look at internet numbers too long and you lose all sense of proportion.

On the more important level, I’ve succeeded now because I write way too much about games. Not just here, of course. Most of it now is at my job with Rascal News (which is running a discount on memberships in honour of losing the Diana Jones Award, you should sign up!) And people seem to like it and support it, that feels great. And I’ve made friends, which is even better. It’s just really nice and I’m glad to be here.

So to acknowledge this in a way that doesn’t involve cheesecake, I thought I’d write five things I’ve learned over the last five years. These are just personal lessons, not advice.

1. The only thing that definitely worked was consistency: I’ve tried a lot of things and many of them worked for a given understanding of “worked” but nothing has mattered more than just being consistent. It’s easy to see “be consistent” — it’s easy to say anything! But what I’ve understood is that consistency is one of those things that is created everywhere else except the work. What I mean is that consistency is a question of the rest of your life. It’s not about organizing the thing you want to be consistent about, it’s about organizing everything else so that there is space to be consistent. It’s about protecting your time and also, losing out on time spent elsewhere. (It’s also usually only possible if someone else picks on the slack on what you’re not doing because you’re doing this.)
2. Play is important but so is the other important stuff: Play is an essential part of life. Scrolling is the little death and not the nice kind. (I say this as I open and close Youtube automatically fifteen times a day.) I think one of the great losses of modern life is how little time there is for play. But at the same time, that doesn’t mean play is disconnected from the rest of life — it isn’t an escape. I mean, I wouldn’t call sleeping or eating an escape. When I talk about games, I like to talk about history, politics, emotions because I think play is important and thus, it doesn’t sit in a separate box from that stuff. And because approaching that stuff through games is fun! It’s hard for me to sit down for a one hour lecture about politics but make it a one hour video essay about the politics of One Piece and suddenly it’s really easy. (The video essay can still be bad but that’s a different problem. A lot of boring essays are just people pointing at things and going “thing!”.)
3. Embrace nuance: It’s always going to be less entertaining than saying something soundbite-y in a snarky voice but hey, there’s less chance you’ll hurt somebody. And while we’re on that subject, give people the benefit the doubt.
4. The best way to be interesting is to be interested: I did not know really how to talk to people growing up. I was poorly socialized in many, many ways. I genuinely had to learn how and this piece of advice about being interested in other people has truly seared itself into my brain. If I’ve succeeded, it’s by being interested in people. I’ve actually displayed very little expertise in the last five years. Mostly I’ve shared the fruits of my attention to other people, their work, their ideas. (Jokes also help.)
5. “Make art, make rent, helps others do the same”: As opposed to the previous advice which I got very young, this is something I only heard recently. Aaron Lim shared this quote — it’s actually a tweet, which I find very amusing — from artist Scott Benson on a discord. And I’ve been thinking about it since then. It’s razor-sharp — perfect in its encapsulation of what my agenda is. This newsletter was never started with the intention of helping people — I would never have had the hubris to think I could. It’s a byproduct of “being interested” that I have shared the work of probably thousands of people at this point. This was something I tried to do with intention — promoting the work of people of colour and trans folks especially — as a way of paying forward. And while I’m sure each of those people were barely helped individually, the hope is that taken in sum, it adds up to something.

Thanks for being here for the fifth anniversary of this newsletter!

Yours proudly,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

• On Yes Indie’d, I spoke to Hendrik ten Napel about his game, The Girls of the Genziana Hotel, which a murder mystery game set in a picturesque but spooky alpine resort. It’s a capsule game with rules, setting, and scenario all-intertwined in a highly-tuned package. And the themes are sharp — the characters (who are chambermaids) are always testing the limits of class and patriarchy as they go about solving the mystery of their missing colleague.

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• You too can support the newsletter on patreon!
• If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.

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III. Links of the Week

• On the Possum Creek Games blog, jay dragon asks does Super Maro Bros (1985) have rules?: “I think this question exposes a fundamental misunderstanding at the heart of laymen/hobbyist conceptions of what a game actually is and what it does.”
  • One for the theoryheads.
• On Taskerland, a fascinating review of Ennie-nominated fairy tale adventure Sweet Revenge: “Sweet Revenge offers a different model of sophistication than the one informing its fellow Ennie nominees. In adventures like The Dream Shrine, The Mall, and Tides of Rot, agency is a function of absence. The GM and players are left to make meaning in the gaps… Sweet Revenge, by contrast, emphasises clarity, connection, and emotional legibility. It does not seek to dazzle through opacity. It seeks to welcome, to reassure, and to deepen slowly over time.”
• On the Burn after Running blog, Guy condenses one of Daggerheart‘s campaign frames into a one-shot and shares his work.

From the archive:

• Judd Karlman’s worksheet for writing Tropy Gold incursions that works as a good reminder of all the ingredients for a fantasy adventure. You print it out and fill it up and that’s your prep for the session. (Issue 108, September 2022)

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IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• One trenchcoat. Too many raccoons. Trenchcoat Raccoons is a chaotic heist RPG of cursed loot, cryptid conspiracies, and glorious disaster. Slick. Stylish. Slightly unhinged. Join the chaos on Gamefound
• desert is a free 54-page roleplaying game and toolkit for GMless campaigns in the near future. Create cities, run factions and navigate a point-based security economy.
• Absurdia is coming to Backerkit! Subvert normalcy, embrace chaos, and get weird in this TTRPG inspired by Welcome to Night Vale, Alice in Wonderland, and Gravity Falls 👁️

This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:

• Fight with Spirit, the sports drama game from the creators of Good Society, at a discount price.
• The Expanse, based on the TV show, and Modern AGE, an action adventure game from Green Ronin in one bundle!

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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!